Clilstore trials at Ulster

May 2, 2012

“It’s excellent, give us more!”, that was the overwhelming response from Year 1 and Year 2 students of Irish at the University of Ulster following a recent trial of Clilstore. The units created for the purpose of this trial: http://alturl.com/w6bao & http://alturl.com/s5jjh were based on sample materials from the new Third Level Syllabus for Irish (see http://www.teagascnagaeilge.ie) which is based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.

The trial was conducted within Ulster’s Multimedia Language Lab and each student had the benefit of using the materials on their own networked pc. The students were impressed by the ease of use of the software, the way it helped them to get to grips with new vocabulary using the dictionary interface and the twin-panel, single-screen format. When asked how they thought the software could be improved the students mostly felt that nothing needed to be changed, however, a few glitches relating to new tabs opening while switching between dictionaries and a non-responsive dictionary were brought to light.

This feedback has been most gratifying for the project team and has given us a useful insight into where we need to concentrate our efforts in the short term i.e. producing more units which reflect the learner level and content needs of our students. Needless to say, any constructive criticism received from the students will be acted upon, and issues such as the size of the font in the exercises have already been dealt with.

It’s good to see the Clilstore platform, being developed by Sabhal Mòr Ostaig (Scotland’s Gaelic College) and European partners through the TOOLS project, getting a good workout across the water with Irish Gaelic too. And it’s interesting, if you follow the links, to listen “through the wall” to Irish speakers talking about some of the same issues about learning and use that affect Scottish Gaelic too here in the islands.

I was intrigued at some of the comments by the second year students about opening in a new tab: “Every time you search a word it opens up a new tab”. I don’t why this should be happening. Wordlink does have a “new tab” mode, but “splitscreen” mode has been the default for years. I don’t know how they could have found their way to “new tab” mode. Obviously from their comments most of the students were getting splitscreen mode ok (and liking it). If you can do anything to help track down why some of them were finding their way to new tab mode, that would be very useful.
I note the comment that the Freelang dictionary was not working for Irish. It turned out that Freelang had changed things and it was not working with Multidict for any other language either. But I got it working again using the new “form” method which I developed a couple of months ago. So thanks for that!
I was surprised that the students did not mention the lack of “lemmatisation” as a problem. Maybe they are adept at changing “tsaoirse” to “saoirse” and suchlike. Anyway, I have plans to do something soon
which should help with lemmatisation.

I totally agree ! Very glad to hear about the results of testing, it is the kind of target-users’ feedback I was waiting for 🙂
All the best from Romania, warm, too warm for May…
Your external critical friend, Ange